Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores cash stuffing, a practice emerging in online retail investor circles where cash is aesthetically earmarked to fix futures. Speculating with these micro-predictions challenges linear financial models and highlights embodiment.

Paper Abstract:

What can we learn when we contextualize practices not just in what past and present they reference but also what future they offer to bring about? I set out to play with this question drawing on an example encountered during my PhD fieldwork, when I worked with retail investors and ‘Finfluencer’ communities on Instagram. A practice emerged in 2023 – cash stuffing.

Unlike yield curves, cash stuffing does not seek to predict the future but to fix it by ‘earmarking’ (Zelizer 1994) cash in envelopes for specific uses. The concern for a visually pleasing, ultimately transient, present – the cash stuffed envelopes are made to be emptied – is tied to the tangible and embodied experience of a highly financialized system. Thinking ahead; a growing popularity of cash stuffing in the face of increasing economic precarity symbolizes a retreat into individually manageable aesthetics that seek (futilely) to regain control by making distant futures immediate. This reveals an intersection of money and finance, at which these aesthetics are essential. Speculating with cash stuffing can allow anthropologists to utilize these everyday micro-predictions to discuss a non-linear time that does not fit common patterns of prediction, right within Western capitalism.